Sunday, May 08, 2005

Howard resigns

the Tories should now look to the future and try to gain credibility on economic topics

And with reason. The leader of the Tories will be 68 at the time of the next election. That is no age to claim the seat of Britain’s prime minister.

Let us hope it will also be a resignation of the failed project of the conservative party since John Major came to power. Since then, the conservatives started to corrupt their own ideas, steadily forgetting the principals where Margaret Thatcher stood for. In 1997, Blair took over as a man who was so bold to change the old socialist project Labour stood for. Even in the extent he was hailed by Thatcher as an honourable man.

Blair’s ideas corrupted. On the right, he engaged in the neoconservative follies of the war in Iraq. On the left, he had to leave power to Gordon Brown, an old-fashioned socialist, who is said to become Prime Minister just before the next elections, to give him the ‘chanchellor’s bonus’. Since 2000, there is again a growing government spending tendency in Britain. The old Keynesian receipts are back from never been away in the Labour project.

The Tories should now look to the future. In 10 years, Europe will be a continent where it is a nice place to live, but which is loosing track. The international competition will force governments in Europe to cut expenses, to privatise and to function as a company.

Therefore the Tories (and in fact also all the old liberal parties of continental Europe), should try to gain credibility on economic topics, as these will be the big issues then. Not the moral questions will become important, unlike now in the US, for example. The growing individualism will declare these issues to be a private matter, in which government shouldn’t have a voice. Are we going to have a public debate on Terri Schiavo – like private matters at a time when high taxes, sustaining big welfare machines, inhibit our companies to grow and new companies to emerge? No, and I think also in the US, the Schiavo case was an unsuccesfull turning point for the religious right, as the public denounced the political exploitation of it.